She met him in 1972, before he wore makeup and 8-inch platforms – back, in fact, when he was an elementary-school teacher from Queens.

Now, Georgeann Walsh Ward is suing her long-ago former beau – KISS bass player and long-tongued co-founder Gene Simmons – for defamation, claiming a recent VH1 documentary portrayed her as just one of Simmons’ overpopulated harem of groupies.

The documentary, “When KISS Ruled the World,” premiered on VH1 last July and has been rerun four times since.

In it, to the 51-year-old wife and mother’s surprise, picture after picture of her in her 20s flashes across the screen as Simmons boasts about his studliness.

“There wasn’t a girl that was off limits, and I enjoyed every one of them,” Simmons enthuses as the three-decades-old images appear on screen, some of the petite, red-headed Ward posing with Simmons and some of her alone.

“I was a 24-hour whore,” Simmons, who estimates he has slept with 4,600 women, boasts as the photos appear. “All I ever thought about was sex.”

Ward, who lives in upstate Chester and is a married mother of a college-age child, is seeking unspecified money damages from Simmons, KISS and Viacom, VH1’s parent company.

She is claiming that Simmons and Viacom portrayed her as an “unchaste, sexually loose woman.”

The show implied that Ward “was similarly a sex-addicted nymphomaniac,” her lawsuit says.

Ward declined comment, and Simmons, who lives in Beverly Hills and still performs with KISS, could not be reached yesterday.

Ward met Simmons when she was 21, and the two dated three years, until 1974, when the sudden success of KISS “propelled him out of the classroom and out of [Ward’s] life,” the suit says.